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constitute a new and major threat. They’d take time to train and they’d desert as fast as they could; but the laws of Hamal are as of steel. Once the Hamalian military machine gained control of an individual clum, that once-free man would turn into just another cog in the iron legions of Hamal.
    Not a pretty prospect, and yet just one of the hundreds of problems that beset me. There was much to ponder as I walked into the end of the main and only street of the village. Pundhri the Serene was not there. He had taken his little party off at once, riding preysanys, a common form of saddle animal among the less wealthy. I looked at the gaffer who told me this, and shook my head, and went away from that village. I had not cared for their looks.
    And this made me even more keenly aware of the strangest part of this whole business.
    I was unarmed.
    On Kregen, a man does not care to be parted from his arsenal of weapons.
    Now I do not wish to impugn the honesty of that village, or the gaffer to whom I had spoken, or his headman. But my surmise is, and I apologize to those unknown Hamalese if I am wrong, my surmise is the gaffer ran off at once to his headman, robe flapping around his ankles, slippers flicking dust, and the headman, fondling his chain of office, nodded sagely and ordered a signal fire lit. It would be a small signal fire. I saw the plume of smoke rise, tall and straight, and I frowned.
    Directly ahead a stream crossed my path with a stand of trees from which the village would have been invisible. They were so damned anxious they hadn’t even waited until their signal smoke would not be seen by the potential victim.
    The smoke rose, thin and unwavering. A one-man signal, that, I guessed.
    I splashed across the stream and looked around in the little copse. Finding a length of wood in a forest is not as easy as it sounds. Oh, yes, there is wood aplenty, lumber by the yard. I wanted a stick of a certain thickness, length and shape, and I took perhaps a little longer than circumspection might suggest was advisable. I found the stick. Barehanded, freeing it from its parent involved a deal of grunting and twisting and straining, and I used my teeth to trim up the ends to a rough symmetry. Some three feet long — some meter long, I suppose you latter-day folk would say — it snugged firmly in my fists, spread apart to give leverage. I swung the stick about. It was not a simple cudgel or bludgeon or shillelagh, admirable though they are in the right hands. This length of simple wood held the feel and balance of a Krozair longsword, and with that potent and terrible brand of destruction a man might go up against devils.
    So, swinging my pseudo-longsword, I marched off out of the wood and I kept screwing my head around and staring aloft.
    They were not long in making their evil appearance.
    The piece of wood stopped its circling motions as I loosened up the old muscles. The end where it had ripped away from its parent glistened yellow and clean and sharp, very sharp, a wooden splinter like a fang.
    Dots against the brightness of the sky, stringing along in a skein, oh, yes, there they were...
    On the exotic and cruel world of Kregen there are many men who make a fat living from the enslavement of other men. There are many varieties of slavers, slavemasters: Aragorn, Katakis, Makansos, and their ilk. From the way these four up there flew they proclaimed themselves flutsmen, reiving mercenaries of the skies. Four would be considered ample to snare up a lone man. They’d flown from their camp, somewhere in a fold of the hills, summoned by the signal smoke. Crossbows would be pouched to their saddles; but they wouldn’t want to damage the merchandise and so wouldn’t choose to feather me unless they had to.
    No doubt my lips ricked back and my ugly old beakhead turned into that devil’s visage, destroying the placid look I adopted as a mere common-sense precaution. Well, by Krun! They’d have cause to — good